“This, perhaps, may suit,” observed the dealer; and then, as he began to re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim.  The long, skewer-like dagger flashed and fell.  The dealer struggled like a hen, striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a heap.

Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried.  All these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings.  Then the passage of a lad’s feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in upon these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness of his surroundings.  He looked about him awfully.  The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea:  the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water.  The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.

From these fear-stricken rovings, Markheim’s eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life.  In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust.  Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing.  And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices.  There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct the miracle of locomotion—­there it must lie till it was found.  Found! ay, and then?  Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that would ring over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit.  Ay, dead or not, this was still the enemy.  “Time was that when the brains were out,” he thought; and the first word struck into his mind.  Time, now that the deed was accomplished—­time, which had closed for the victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer.

The thought was yet in his mind, when, first one and then another, with every variety of pace and voice—­one deep as the bell from a cathedral turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a waltz—­the clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.

The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber staggered him.  He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle, beleaguered by moving shadows, and startled to the soul by chance reflections.  In many rich mirrors, some of home designs, some from Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated and repeated, as it were an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet.  And still as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind